Sharp-shooting women best Soviet snipers.

• Position: The World at War

Soviet military records from World War II contain evidence that women can be as effective front-line soldiers as men, reports Anna Krylova, assistant professor of history at Duke University, Durham, N.C. Krylova has studied the mass volunteering of young Soviet women for combat in 1941, their integration into the armed forces, and the implications that their performance had on gender roles in the military and Soviet society at large.

Krylova, who grew up in Moscow, declares that 800,000 women served in the Soviet military during WWII, 350,000 of them in combat. According to USSR records and memoirs written by men and women, females between the ages of 17-27 turned out to be quick learners in the martial arts and became effective as bomber and fighter pilots, snipers, machine-gunners, anti-aircraft fighters, and combat engineers, as well as platoon and company commanders.

"Women snipers, because they were extremely well trained, were often much more effective than male snipers," Krylova maintains. "The snipers who graduated from the Central Women's Sniper School in Moscow proudly reported over 11,000 German soldiers killed."

The female sniper Liudmila Pavlichenko who, in a year and a half, killed 309 Germans, was as well-known as the famous male sniper Vladimir Pchelintsev, Krylova points out. Moreover, "if we look at comparable male and female night bomber regiments, the women's regiment proved superior to the male regiment in terms of their statistics of accuracy of target-hitting. In the Fourth Air Force Division, for example, the female night bombers were known for the extreme accuracy of their hits and they were assigned to the most-demanding...